Once, this block with its chain fashion, discount clothing and cell phones was a grand fin de siècle emporium. Here in 1897, the merchant, Benjamin Beardmore Evans opened his draper’s; in a few short years his store haemorrhaging along the High Road until it had consumed eight shop fronts. Evans a purveyor of Egyptian cotton sheets, shoes made from crocodiles’ skins and ornaments fashioned out of lapis lazuli. For fifty yards, his store’s grand windows displayed leather bags from the Levant, Venetian glass lanterns and Parisienne couture until a dropped Westminster on a chintz cushion sent up a thin wire of smoke as red teeth bore through thin fabric. The iridescent orange tip tunnelling a tiny black-rimmed hole into the dusty goose down which flinched as the heat tore into it, small flames glowing and plenty for them to eat. Seventeen-year-old Emily Harriman taking a break from plumping and sweeping the soft furnishings, dozing, cigarette in hand over her copy of Home Chat. The cushion properly alight by now, but too hot to smoke, fire making light work of the chaise’s silk cover, gorging on kapok and webbing, the heat burning Emily Harriman beneath her apron. Waking, the girl shrieked and patted out the flames on her clothing. She ran for the pail, water landing with a brown smack, the flames shrinking for a moment before falling back on their work. Now the whole couch was ablaze, Harriman crying with the fear of it, the carpet smoking too where molten resin dripped onto it.

“Fire Fire!” Emily Harriman hurrying down the wooden stairs as the inferno gathered its armies, others following, wanting to know how the blaze began. In the January afternoon gloom on the street below, an orange glow pulsed behind a second floor window. A shrill fire bell as staff and servants from forty departments on two stories filed out of the store founded thirteen years earlier by Beardmore Evans who, as it happens, was clean shaven. Barely fifteen minutes after Emily Harriman dropped ash on chintz, three more windows glowed red as bare headed shopgirls ran onto the street where a small crowd negan to assemble. By now, curtains were ablaze and the fire bell continued as someone remembered the dog, the big black dog who slept by the hearth in the staff kitchen; did anyone think to look for him? Harriman running back inside despite a bobby shouting to keep away, up one, two, three, four half-flights of stairs dense with smoke, but the door was locked. Harriman pressing her shoulder on it as the dog whimpered on the other side but it was fast, the girl now stepping back and hurling herself at it, shrieking with fury at the fire and herself. The door shifting a little and Harrriman running at it again and again until one of the panels splintered and she could reach through. The dog barking in terror but the handle almost too hot to touch. Unable to turn it, Harriman using her boots to kick the lower panels of the door until the animal pushed through, yelping, bounding past her down the stairs, its claws skittering on the wood. Cheers as dog and shopgirl appeared out of the choking black fog. On the street, firemen had set up a long ladder and as the dog jumped around Emily Harriman and licked her hands, greedy flames leapt through every department of B.B. Evans store, devouring rolls of fabric, haberdashery, men’s trousers and umbrellas; melting soap and glass and cracking ceramics. A group of men hurried to the stables at the rear of the building to free the horses, pulling at heavy green-painted doors and dragging the animals by the bridle. The northern end of the block now a furnace of black smoke and red rolling flame, and the police and fire brigade ordering people away from the building. The inferno a low, bass roar, hypnotic, dancing yellow dragons licking the roof, snaking around the ornate cornicing as men climbed ladders, directing their hoses into the furnace. The last fireman to leave, a wet towel over his face and a ragdoll body over his shoulder, all staff now accounted for. The early evening air had become a stench of burned rubber, paint and textiles cooking at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and the whole north end of the store now eaten by fire, only the brick façade remaining. People pointing as the wall itself began to buckle, running back to the safety of Glengall Road as the third storey frontage bowed outwards and bricks began raining onto the pavement beneath. The clown had joined the crowd, glad of the warmth, watching tall flames shoot high into the low canopy of night. Petting the dog, Emily Harriman felt an ache in her shoulder and a searing pain in the palm of her hand for the first time. As he passed by in the days that followed, the clown watched the bowler hatted Evans instructing the repair and rebuilding of his empire, noting the diligence and speed of the workmen. Months later, only the unmistakable smell of water on burnt wood, a reek that any number of coats of fresh paint could not mask. Today, much of the ground floor is taken up by a German discount grocery chain. No trace of Beardmore Evans’ store remains, the smell of fire completely gone.